If I get One More, I'm gonna Scream!

[begin venting here]
I have been getting the SoberY virus emails at a rate of about 3 to 5 per minute for the past 4 or 5 days and I'M ABOUT OVER IT!

They're getting caught by my antivirus, but that annoying little screen pops up every frickin time. It takes 10 mins to delete them all each morning, not to mention the continual arrival and deletion all day long.

Why do people let this crap go on and on? Don't they have antivirus software that prevents this? Can't they tell they've been infected? There should be a law that all computers have current antivirus software or they lose their internet access! No updated definitions? No internet access. This is getting sooooooo old.
[end of vent]

I thought I was the only one! Every few minutes, in all of my accounts, I get like 5 new emails. I can't block the IP address, either. Norton pops up, but stops all of the other emails from coming in until I delete the infected email. It's a constant annoyance.

And when I wake up in the morning? Forget it! I have at leat 80 waiting or me in each mail box... and I have to verify each one against Norton.

I'm afraid of what will happen while I am in vegas for 8 days.

Rocky

Join the club, and as for people who don't have an anti virus program, well let's just say that many are just plain 'odd' like one guy I know, spends $200 to $300 every 3 or so months to take his computer to the local repair shop, have the tech check it out, clean it from the 1000's of viruses he gets, and still doesn't think he needs a firewall installed even though he has one still in the box for over a year... (banging head) and can't figure out to this day why no one answers his emails.. (give up gremlin if there was one)

We switched to Appriver, a hosted antispam/antivirus solution, about 6 months ago. One of my main mail addresses had gotten so infested with spam as to be completely unusable, but now I *maybe* get one or two spams in a day, if I get any at all. And Appriver also does an amazing job of filtering out viruses as well.

The best part is, their false-positive rate is very, very close to zero... I don't think I've *ever* had a legitimate individual email that it mismarked. It does sometimes categorize email newsletters, but a quick adjustment takes care of that.

If you buy it individually, it's expensive ($20/month + about $1/mailbox), but if you have an ISP that has an Appriver reseller deal, it's much, much cheaper.

I haven't got an spam for a long time. I use CloudMark and all my spam goes to the spam folder. Not many spam messages get by it. I guess I will keep my fingers crossed and hopefully I won't get any SoberY virus emails.
I hope your problem gets better.

Mark

I agree...
I think out of 1000 emails a day about 20 of them are "real".
The time, bandwidth, and risk of deleting a real one drives me crazy.

Since we are also a hosting company I can't tell you how many calls and helpdesk we get from users. And we already use spamassassin and have blocked all the Chinanet and Korea emails.

Our next step is to put in place Barracuda's system.
They have some great boxes for people with under 50 domains and also those with 5,000+ domains. The basic cost is starting around $1400 and goes from there.

But the cool factors is that this box is updated often by "real" people. And you can also add other rules "live".

There are some other boxes out there but they all are abound $1000 to over $12000.

Although I wouldn't suggest this for business email you can also get rid of ALL your email and just use forms to have people contact you. Or..and I hat this too...spamarrest.com.

Check with your hosting company and see if they offer any hardware based spam solutions you can add to your account. They normally charge a small fee per email...should only be under $10 per account/month.

We will end up charging $2.50 per account/month as we want as many of our clients using this so our server loads will not be as high.

What a shame...we are reduced to getting servers just to filter spam.

Steven

yes, you can install antivirus protection on your server and it is somewhat effective but not 100%. You can also install anti-spam filters on the server but I highly recommend against them due to the nature of our business you will lose a lot of legit emails. Instead, I would recommend you get a client-based filter system, like the one that is part of Outlook 2003, where it downloads and sorts your email and gives you the chance to quickly check through them all before permanently deleting them.

Ren, I have sent you an email, hopefully it will help you out.

cheers,
Luke

Yes, I know how it feels, this is really horrible

They all seem to go in waves, last week I received between 5-10 a day and then they all suddenly stopped (!?), the spam, that's another thing, 200 aprox. a day...

i get over 1200 emails per day, with on a good day 30 emails meant for me and 20 relevant boardtracker emails. i've actually started downloading ALL my email into my yahoomail box because of all the viruses and trojans.

Yes yes the last month plus has truly SUCKED!
I am root for ALL of our mail (web masters, sales, support and yadda yadda) and I'd say I averaged 3000/day, before this all happened. It's closer to 5k/day now!


Thanks to a). Avast's Anti-virus program, all the viruses go away without my needing to respond! I simply set it up so it does the work without my having to confirm. b). I use Outlooks rules wizard to elimiate the remaining schlock. (Rules wizard, please shift-delete ALL mail with subject "your account; important information; rolex; viagra...).
When used, tools are a wonderful thang!

I would/coiuld not deal with "I found a viruse, what should I do..."
"I found a viruse, what should I do..."
"I found a viruse, what should I do..."
"I found a viruse, what should I do..."
"I found a viruse, what should I do..."
"I found a viruse, what should I do..."
.
.
.
umpteen hundred + times a day.

never heard of Avast so I did some checking into it:
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
"avast! Home Edition is now free of charge for HOME users for NON-COMMERCIAL use."

woohoo, will be downloading this right away. Thanks for the info Paco

cheers,
Luke

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chilihost

never heard of Avast so I did some checking into it:
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
"avast! Home Edition is now free of charge for HOME users for NON-COMMERCIAL use."

woohoo, will be downloading this right away. Thanks for the info Paco
cheers,
Luke

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Hey Luke - sorry I did not post more info about (be sure you register the free version as it will extend use).

Glad I was able to add something useful, for once.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chilihost

yes, you can install antivirus protection on your server and it is somewhat effective but not 100%. You can also install anti-spam filters on the server but I highly recommend against them due to the nature of our business you will lose a lot of legit emails. Instead, I would recommend you get a client-based filter system, like the one that is part of Outlook 2003, where it downloads and sorts your email and gives you the chance to quickly check through them all before permanently deleting them.

Ren, I have sent you an email, hopefully it will help you out.

cheers,
Luke

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This was a great answer - however back to the original question~
The answer is simple - as with driving - you should have to have a license to operate a pc - with different levels of licensing -
A standard license allowing you to only surf websites and handle email with max. security enforced on your pc this would be for newbies.
and so on and so on ...
Problem is just anybody can operate a pc and half of em have no damn biz in front of a monitor ~ {well theres a lot of people driving that shouldnt be either } but its the same thing imho ....
Educate the users and the problem will decrease~ :penny:

same here dear and it's annoying.